5 Best WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugins for 2023

Are you considering offering a WooCommerce subscription product on your store this year? If you do, you’ve hit the nail on the head. Allowing customers to have access to a product as a subscription rather than a one-time purchase is a win for both the consumer and the seller.

Amazon’s popular Subscribe and Save scheme has already primed consumers for subscribing. Many of them have experienced first-hand how rewarding and convenient subscribing to routine products and supplies can be. Not only do subscriptions offer guaranteed discounts, but they also save the hassle of repeat purchasing — for instance, filling carts, selecting shipping addresses, and completing the checkout process for each refill.

Subscriptions work well for businesses that sell products to end consumers and also for those that provide supplies to other companies. Like regular consumers, B2B business customers can maintain good supply levels and make savings by locking in subscriptions.

But how do you bring subscriptions to your WooCommerce store? To set up a WooCommerce subscription product on your shop, you need a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin like Autoship Cloud. Let’s see how a WooCommerce subscription product works before looking at the top WooCommerce subscriptions plugins.

What is a WooCommerce subscription product? And what are WooCommerce subscriptions plugins?

A WooCommerce subscription product is one that customers can subscribe to and receive on a regular basis. Below, you can see a WooCommerce subscription product that ships every month rather than being a one-time purchase:

Processing a WooCommerce subscription product allows you to : 

1. Automatically (re)generate a renewal order for it based on the subscription schedule.
2. Process the automatically placed order.
3. Charge a repeat payment for it based on the set billing schedule.

WooCommerce doesn’t support subscriptions by default and can’t process recurring scheduled orders. To enable these, you need a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin. A WooCommerce subscriptions plugin does all the above for you and more. Let’s now explore five of the best plugins that enable you to set up a WooCommerce subscription product on your store.

What are the best WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugins?

At their core, all WooCommerce subscriptions plugins do the same thing: help you set up a WooCommerce subscription product. They bring in all of the bells and whistles that WooCommerce lacks for managing and fulfilling subscriptions. Based on their unique use cases, here are your best options:

• Autoship Cloud for an all-in-one WooCommerce subscriptions plugin that enables Amazon-like subscribe and save functionalities on your physical goods store.
• WooCommerce Subscriptions for enabling recurring payments and selling physical and virtual products as subscriptions.
• YITH WooCommerce Subscription for selling subscriptions on WooCommerce if you’re already using products from the YITH ecosystem.
• SUMO Subscriptions – WooCommerce Subscription System for bringing automated recurring payments via PayPal and Stripe and enabling subscriptions.
• Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscriptions for an easy solution to sell WooCommerce subscriptions via PayPal and Stripe.

You can also consider MemberPress (a WordPress membership plugin) if you want to bring subscription-based commerce — selling exclusive podcasts, for instance — to your membership site.

Autoship Cloud

Autoship Cloud is a complete WooCommerce-WordPress plugin for enabling subscriptions. It helps WooCommerce store owners, who sell physical goods to end-users or supplies to business customers, set up a subscription-based business model where users can buy product subscriptions instead of making one-off purchases. Notice how Autoship Cloud’s front-end subscription experience is very similar to Amazon’s.

Key features:

• Subscriptions: Autoship Cloud adds an Amazon-like subscribe and save option to your product pages and to your cart page, allowing users to make a one-time purchase upgrade right before checking out. Autoship Cloud works seamlessly with simple and variable WooCommerce (physical) products. Your users can buy both subscription and non-subscription products in a single checkout process.
• Subscriber experience: Subscribers can edit their upcoming scheduled orders (and even reschedule, cancel, pause, or downgrade/upgrade their subscription plans), change their shipping address, and update their preferred payment methods, among other things.
• Initial setup: Being a complete subscriptions plugin for physical goods sellers, you only need Autoship Cloud to power end-to-end subscription management on your WooCommerce store. As a result, the initial setup only takes a few minutes where you install the plugin. Once you’ve installed Autoship Cloud, you can choose any of your existing WooCommerce products and enable “Autoship” for them, which instantly converts them to subscription products. You can edit each product individually too. Adding new products as subscriptions is pretty straightforward as well.
• Communications: Autoship Cloud works seamlessly with SendGrid® to email users (and admins) when key subscription lifecycle events happen (like recurring subscription payment processing). You can also email your subscribers before their next payment is charged, giving them a window for editing or canceling their scheduled deliveries.
• Support for free trials or samples and registration fee: You can quickly implement free trials and offer complimentary samples with Autoship Cloud. Collecting a signup fee is possible, too.
• Payment logistics: Autoship Cloud supports over 10 payment gateways, including PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.Net, Square, Braintree, and NMI, and supports payment methods like credit cards.
• Shipping integrations: Thanks to Autoship Cloud’s integration with ShipperHQ, you can ensure the cheapest shipping rates for your customers for each delivery.
• Discount coupons/promotions: You can easily create personalized coupons and combine discounts with offers like free shipping.
• Data reporting: Autoship Cloud comes with a detailed revenue dashboard, inventory forecasting, and event logs so that you can make data-driven growth decisions. You can generate several detailed reports without needing any coding.

Autoship Cloud covers a wide range of eCommerce subscription use cases right from selling curation bundled offerings to meal subscription boxes. And of course, it covers regular B2C and B2B WooCommerce physical goods subscription business models.

Autoship Cloud costs $49/mo and offers a free two-week trial period. Sign up now. Check out this video to see how easy setting up WooCommerce subscriptions with Autoship Cloud really is:

WooCommerce Subscriptions

WooCommerce Subscriptions is WooCommerce’s very own subscriptions plugin. With WooCommerce Subscriptions, you can add a subscription option to your regular WooCommerce products and turn them into subscriptions.

Key features:

• Subscriptions: WooCommerce Subscriptions lets you add subscription options to your product and cart pages. WooCommerce Subscriptions works well with simple and variable products and you can use it to sell both virtual and digital products as subscriptions.
• Subscriber experience: Subscribers can edit their details like their payment methods, shipping addresses, and even manage their subscriptions by canceling, downgrading, or upgrading. 
• Initial setup: Installing the base plugin is very easy and so is adding new subscriptions. But because this plugin misses a few critical functionalities for powering subscriptions, you need to install a host of addons with it. For example, if you want to enable subscriptions for all your existing products, you need the “All Products for WooSubscriptions” addon. Likewise, if you need to alert a user before charging their subscription payment, you need another addon, and so on. The initial setup thus becomes quite an exercise.
• Communications: WooCommerce Subscriptions lets you email your users when they’re charged and for other subscription status changes (like cancelations). Setting up email notifications for alerting users before they’re charged, though, needs yet another addon.
• Support for free trials or samples and registration fee: WooCommerce Subscriptions brings tools to offer free trials and samples. You can easily set up a one-time signup fee to cover your subscription costs.
• Payment logistics: WooCommerce Subscriptions integrates with over 25 payment options, including PayPal and Stripe! 
• Discount coupons/promotions: You can effortlessly launch one-time and recurring discounts with WooCommerce subscriptions.
• Data reporting: WooCommerce Subscriptions offers basic reporting on metrics like your recurring revenue and active subscriptions, among others.

WooCommerce Subscriptions is available for $199/year.

YITH WooCommerce Subscription

YITH WooCommerce Subscription, just like WooCommerce Subscriptions, lets you convert your physical and virtual WooCommerce products and services into subscriptions.

Key features:

• Subscriptions: YITH WooCommerce Subscription adds custom subscription features to your physical and downloadable products and services. It can enable subscriptions for both simple and variable WooCommerce products.
• Subscriber experience: Subscribers can pause, upgrade, downgrade, cancel, and even resubscribe to their subscriptions on their own.
• Initial setup: Most users who go with the YITH WooCommerce Subscription plugin are already using YITH’s ecosystem of WooCommerce products. So your installation setup depends on what YITH products you need to use along with it. 
• Communications: This WooCommerce subscriptions plugin comes bundled with dozens of email templates to facilitate email communication over the entire subscription lifecycle.
• Support for free trials or samples and registration fee: You can easily offer a free trial period and send samples while also charging a signup fee.
• Payment logistics: You can enable various payment gateways with this plugin, but you might need a few of YITH’s other plugins to allow all.
• Discount coupons/promotions: Launching one-off and recurring discounts is easy with YITH WooCommerce Subscription. 
• Data reporting: You get basic reporting like your recurring revenue and subscription data. You might have to use its dev tools to generate better reporting.

YITH WooCommerce Subscription comes with a (limited) free version; premium versions start at $199.99/year.

SUMO Subscriptions – WooCommerce Subscription System

SUMO Subscriptions is another comprehensive WooCommerce plugin that lets you create and sell subscriptions on your WooCommerce store. You can offer simple and variable subscriptions with it.

Key features:

• Subscriptions: SUMO Subscriptions lets you add subscriptions to your product and cart pages. SUMO Subscriptions supports both simple and variable WooCommerce products, and you can use it to sell virtual products as subscriptions as well.
• Subscriber experience: Your subscribers get subscription management tools to edit,  pause, cancel, upgrade, or downgrade their subscriptions.
• Initial setup: SUMO Subscriptions is an easy-to-set-up plugin. However, you might find yourself needing to install a host of other plugins to complete your subscriptions setup — such as a third-party plugin for powering email communications, for instance.
• Communications: This plugin supports payment reminder emails.
• Support for free trials or samples and registration fee: You can easily offer free trials and samples with this subscriptions plugin. You can also charge a one-time signup fee.
• Payment logistics: You can only use PayPal and Stripe with this WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. SUMO Subscriptions supports automated and semi-automated payments (where users need to approve each subscription payment before it can be charged).  
• Discount coupons/promotions: You get tools for launching different kinds of one-time and recurring discounts with this plugin.
• Data reporting: SUMO Subscriptions offers basic reporting on your recurring revenue and your number of active subscriptions.

SUMO Subscriptions sells for $49 and offers six months of support.

Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscriptions

Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscriptions is yet another WooCommerce subscriptions extension that lets you sell your regular WooCommerce products as subscriptions.

Key features:

• Subscriptions: Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscriptions lets your users subscribe to your products on your product and cart pages. This plugin works with both simple and variable WooCommerce products and can be used to sell physical as well as virtual or digital products as subscriptions. Users can check out with subscription and non-subscription products in a single checkout.
• Subscriber experience: Subscribers can edit, pause, or cancel subscriptions via their Accounts page. 
• Initial setup: Setting up the plugin is easy. However, you might find yourself installing a number of other plugins from the same author to make the most of your subscription model. 
• Communications: You may need WooCommerce Custom Emails (another plugin from the same author) to enable automatic email communications. But payment emails in the case of manual payments are supported by default.
• Support for free trials or samples and registration fee: You get settings to offer free trials and samples. Charging a signup fee is also possible.
• Payment logistics: This WooCommerce subscriptions plugin supports only PayPal and Stripe. You can set up fully automated subscription renewal and manual payments (where users need to complete the payment themselves).
• Discount coupons/promotions: You’ll need an additional plugin (WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing & Discounts) from the same author to launch coupons and similar promotions.
• Data reporting: You can easily view details of your subscriptions inside the plugin’s data dashboard.

Subscriptio – WooCommerce Subscriptions sells for $69 and offers six months of support.

Wrapping it up…

As you just saw, while all WooCommerce subscriptions plugins essentially do the same thing, each shines at a specific use case. If you sell physical goods — whether to end consumers or business customers — Autoship Cloud IS the single most complete WooCommerce subscriptions solution for you. So much so that our customers have reported a 10% increase in average order value within a year of using our plugin.

From launching easy subscribe and save schemes and running cross-selling and upselling promotions for boosting order value to processing recurring payments across all popular payment gateways, Autoship Cloud brings everything you need to power your WooCommerce product subscriptions at a very competitive price point.

Plus, you can configure Autoship Cloud and enable subscriptions on your WooCommerce store within minutes. So sign up for Autoship Cloud’s fully-featured two-week FREE trial now and set up your first WooCommerce subscription product!